The Wild Road Read online

‘They call me One for Sorrow,’ it said. ‘And you won’t forget me in a hurry.’

  *

  Alone, thought Tag.

  He tested this idea until sudden panic swept through him. He ran around and around the lawn until he was tired again. He licked his fur in the sunshine for ten minutes. He couldn’t think what to do. He jumped up onto a windowsill and rubbed both sides of his face on the window pane. ‘Breakfast!’ he demanded. But clearly it would not be feeding him today. So he jumped down and tried the same with the back door. No luck. Clearly no one would be feeding him today.

  He had a new idea. He would feed himself.

  Eat a bee, he thought. Eat more than one.

  And he tore off excitedly across the lawn, the little bell on his collar jingling.

  An hour later he had chased four houseflies, a blackbird, two sparrows, and a leaf. He had caught one of the houseflies and the leaf. The leaf proved to be unpalatable. No bees were about. All this effort made him hungrier than before. He went back to the house and jumped up on the windowsill again.

  ‘Yow!’ he said.

  Nothing. It was silent and empty in there.

  He stalked a wren, which scolded him from a safe place inside a hedge. He tried it on with two squirrels, who bobbed their tails at him and sped off along the top of a board fence at a breakneck pace, vying with each other for the lead and calling ‘Stuff you!’ and ‘Stuff your nuts, mate!’ as they ran. Then he tried a thrush, which kept a lazy eye on him while it shelled its breakfast – a yellow snail – against a stone, then rose up neatly as he pounced, and with no fuss or fluster cleared his optimistic jaws by four inches and left him clapping his front paws silently on empty air.

  ‘Nice technique,’ said an interested voice behind him.

  ‘Pretty stupid cat, though,’ answered another. ‘Anyone could have caught that.’

  Tag thought he recognized one of the voices, but he was too ashamed to turn around and look. For the rest of that day, he ate flies. They were easy to catch and, depending on what they had eaten recently, even tasted good. In the middle of the afternoon he bullied some sparrows off half a slice of buttered white bread two gardens along the row. Finally, he went back to the place where he had argued with the thrush. There he caught some snails. They didn’t taste in the slightest bit good, but at least, he thought, he was denying them to the thrush.

  Toward evening it began to rain.

  The rain came stealthily at first, a drop here and a drop there. It tapped and popped on the leaves of the hostas, where it gathered as shiny beads – each containing a tiny curved image of the world – that soon collapsed into little short-lived rivulets. The snails, sensing the rain, opened themselves up gratefully. Then, sensing Tag, they shut themselves away again. There was a kind of hush around the sound of each raindrop.

  Tag watched the snails and waited. A cat with a thick coat doesn’t feel the rain until too late. Suddenly it was pouring down on him, straight as a stair rod, cold and penetrating as a needle. He was surprised and disgusted to find himself soaked. His skin twitched. He stretched and stood up. He shook out first one front paw, then the other. He retreated to the back doorstep.

  No good.

  A gust of wind shook the shrubbery and blew the rain across the garden in swirls, right into his shelter. He sat there grimly for a bit, trying to lick the damp off his fur, fluffing up, blinking, shaking himself, licking again. But in the end he had to admit that he was just as wet there as he would have been in the middle of the lawn.

  I hate rain, he thought.

  He dashed out into the downpour to try the windowsill.

  Wet.

  He found a dry patch in the lee of the terra-cotta pots. The wind changed and blew the rain into his face.

  He tried sitting under the trees.

  Wet.

  Soon it was coming dark. ‘Stop raining now,’ said Tag. Every time he changed position he got wetter. He was hungry again, and cold. But if he scampered about to keep warm he felt tired very suddenly. He ordered the rain, ‘Leave me alone, now.’ The rain didn’t listen. The garden didn’t listen. The wind was like a live thing. It was always blowing from behind him, ruffling his fur up the wrong way to find and chill any part of him that still had any warmth left. He turned around and tried to bite the harder gusts. He ran blindly about or simply sat, becoming more and more bedraggled. Suddenly he realized that he was sitting by the door of the garden shed.

  Inside, he thought.

  He hooked his paw around the bottom of the door and pulled hard. It wouldn’t move. Open! he heard himself think. Open, now! He hooked again and pulled harder. This made him so weary he needed to sit down; but after a moment he was cold again and had to force himself to get up.

  Hook. Pull. No good.

  ‘Come on. Tag,’ he encouraged himself. ‘Come on!’

  Hook. Pull. The door scraped open an inch. Then two.

  That’s enough! thought Tag.

  For some minutes he was too worn out to do anything but sit in front of the door with his head down, looking at nothing. Then he pushed his face cautiously into the gap, and the rest of him, bedraggled and shivering, seemed to follow of its own accord.

  *

  It rained. Days and nights came and went, and still no one summoned him for ‘the task.’ The house remained empty and the lawn filled with puddles. Then the last leaves fell from the trees, and the nights drew in tight, like a collar around a young cat’s neck. Smoke hung low over the gardens in the late afternoon; the days began with thick mists. Winter ushered itself in, quietly and without fuss, in the voice of the roosting crows, the raw chill in the evening air. Tag lived in the shed, and soon became familiar with its pungent smells of ancient sacks and insecticides, spiderwebs and mice. He never caught a mouse there, but it was reassuring to think that one day he might. If it was not warm, the shed was at least dry. The shed saved him.

  When he felt strong, he ranged up and down the gardens, three or four houses in every direction. He ate flies. He ate earthworms. He ate anything that could be caught without a great expenditure of energy. He got up in the dawn to beat the squirrels to the scraps ofbread and lard and meat that other cats’ dulls put out for the birds. He became thin and quick but easier and easier to tire. He avoided confrontations. Seen in the distance in the gardens at sunrise on a cold morning, he was like a white ghost, a twist of breath in the frost. Close to, his silver coat was tangled and muddy and out of condition.

  Some days it was all he could do to find the energy to crouch at a puddle and lap up rainwater, then make his way back to the shed. Eat something tomorrow, he would think; and then after a confused doze get up again in the belief that tomorrow had already come. Which in a way it had.

  He never left the gardens. If he thought about his life, he thought that this was the way he would live it now. Tiredness, and the comforting sound of the rain on the roof of the shed.

  Then one night everything changed again.

  2

  The Highway

  Let none who might belong to himself belong to another.

  – AGRIPPA

  It was a night without rain after a day of frost. Everything in the gardens was very still. A sliver of moon hung high up behind the lacy fretwork of lime and sycamore branches. The gardens seemed to stretch away forever under it, silvered less with moonlight than with cold.

  There was a highway cutting across a corner of the lawn not ten yards from the house with blue shutters. Every night, cats came and went on it, big with errands Tag didn’t understand. Traffic had increased with the colder weather, each traveler transfigured and urgent in the moonlight – more serious, more animal. Full of aggression and pride, posing and pausing, they whipped their tails, bubbling with outrage. His encounter with the one-eyed creature in the shadows had left him deeply attracted, deeply repelled. He wanted to know about them. He desperately wanted to be one of them. He desperately wanted to stay as he was.

  He lay on his heap of sacks, listen
ing to them pass, and lapsed into an unrestful dream in which all the food and warmth he remembered from his vanished kittenhood had somehow become wound up with images of the highway. He was sitting on a windowsill looking out, and somehow at the same time standing on the highway looking in. Around him on the highway a kind of wild energy seemed to flow. The animals he saw were only discrete packets of that energy. Without them it would still flow. It would always flow, as if for every live thing that made a journey, a million ghosts made it too, rushing in both directions forever. In the dream, that energy brushed Tag, touched him like stroking fingers, filled him with grimness and determination. Along that road, the one-eyed shadow awaited him. It sat roaring up at the moon, the biggest cat he had ever seen. It turned to face him and he thought it said, ‘Tag, I am the Majicou.’

  At this, a great terror entered Tag’s body, and he ran away. But the Majicou was always in front of him. It said, ‘Tag, wherever you run I will be there first. It is in my nature, and yours. Listen. You must help me—’

  ‘No!’ said Tag.

  He had to get away. He struggled to wake up. The dream wrapped itself into a parcel, shrank suddenly in front of him, and rushed away down the long black emptiness. As it diminished, the black cat was calling urgently, ‘Tag… the spring equinox… time is running out!’ Its voice seemed to fade into the distance. Then, so far away it was barely audible, ‘Tintagel…’

  Tag woke to a series of shrieks echoing through the cruel air, as some animal caught and killed another in the jungle at the end of the lawn. In the deep silence that followed, he could hear spiders scuttling about in the shed – survivors who had learned to stay high up in the roof where he couldn’t reach them. He shuddered. He turned around and tucked his nose under his tail. He drifted off again.

  Perhaps ten minutes later, half awake, half asleep, moving like an automaton, he got up and left the shed.

  The highway, he thought.

  He thought, It’s just a garden path.

  It was just an overgrown garden path at the corner of a lawn. At the same time it was a strange, dark, shifting blur only an animal could understand, rich with motion, stuffed with meaning. Everything has two natures, Tag thought confusedly, the wild and the tame. He stood, neither a pet cat nor a wild one, swaying at its edge. He was ready to take his place in the flow. But when he pushed forward, something resisted him. He felt as if he were pushing against a taut plastic membrane that fitted so closely around his face that his nostrils were stopped up. There was a faint stretched noise, like the surface of a bubble before it bursts. Nothing happened. Tag stood there. He was fully awake now, or thought he was, and paralyzed with fear. Why had he done this? He didn’t dare move. The animals went to and fro in front of him.

  Suddenly Tag shuddered convulsively. He summoned up all his energy and stepped into the flux.

  *

  His first time on the wild road, everything was like the worst dream he had ever had – darkness, objects rushing past, shapes unrecognizable and haunted. There was a cold continual wind blowing from whichever direction he faced. Tag turned around and around on his haunches, trying to see where it was coming from. It was icy and dusty at once. The noise was unbearable: a million animal voices, slurred and strung out, so deep they seemed to move in Tag’s bowels, so high-pitched they shattered something in his head. And shattered it again, and again and again. Smells so simple they made him gag. Smells so complex they could never be decoded. Things brushed him. He heard laughter at his expense, echoing and re-echoing into a space that was rigidly linear – the highway – and yet seemed to extend in all directions at once. The garden had vanished. The house with blue shutters had vanished. He wasn’t in the world he knew. He wasn’t anywhere, he knew. He felt himself panic. He ran a few steps at random, at a loss. Something huge appeared, traveling very fast. He flinched, crouched.

  ‘Little cat!’ he heard a voice say in a long, stretched, gluey growl. ‘Little cat, don’t stand your ground!’

  Suddenly something hit him very hard in the side and he was bowled over and over through the darkness, as if one of the dulls had picked him up and thrown him through the air and walked away and let him fall…

  *

  When he woke, he was sprawled on the lawn, and a large fox was standing over him.

  ‘I can see you like to live dangerously,’ it said. ‘What on earth possessed you to try that one?’

  ‘What one?’ said Tag. He felt bruised all over. His throat was dry and hot. His stomach ached from a bad earthworm he had eaten earlier in the day. ‘I was asleep,’ he said resentfully.

  ‘Then you’re a tough dreamer,’ said the fox. ‘That’s all I can say.’ It considered this. ‘No one gains entry headfirst and full tilt like that,’ it remarked. It added, ‘Not at your age anyway.’

  It was a handsome animal: long-backed, reddish, brindling toward its hindquarters and long tail, exuding a fine strong reek of fox. It regarded him for a moment, head on one side, bright eyes full of a mixture of greed and humor, cunning and goodwill, all those oppositions that make up the character of the fox. It grinned, and hung its long tongue out of the corner of its mouth.

  ‘I’m not sure I could do that myself,’ it said. ‘And I’m good.’

  ‘What at?’ said Tag.

  ‘Anyway, look, if you’re all right now, I’ll be off.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Tag.

  He felt dizzy and lonely. He felt like someone who lived on a pile of sacks in a shed. He liked the fox despite himself. He wanted to say. Stay for a bit until I feel better, but his voice wasn’t working well enough.

  So off went the fox at a relaxed lope, in circles with its nose to the lawn. It found a puddle of water, stopped, and drank at length, looking up every so often. Then it pushed its way out of the garden, its white-tipped tail vanishing among some elders, leafless laburnum bushes, and apple trees. Tag dragged himself to his feet. He could hear the fox blundering about noisily in the leaf mold.

  ‘Come back,’ he called. ‘Come back now.

  ‘Please.’

  There was a silence. Then the fox’s nose appeared out of the undergrowth some distance from where it had left the garden.

  ‘Was it you who ran me over?’ demanded Tag.

  ‘No,’ said the fox, coming a little way into Tag’s garden again and sitting down. ‘If you’d been run over nothing could have helped you. I got you out of its way in time.’

  ‘What was it?’

  The fox said, ‘You don’t want to know, little cat.’ It added, ‘Believe me.’

  ‘Why did it hate me?’

  The fox looked puzzled. ‘It didn’t have any feelings about you one way or another.’

  ‘Can you help me?’ said Tag.

  The fox grinned. ‘No one can help you with the wild road. It’s a knack.’

  ‘No,’ said Tag. ‘Not that. I never want to do that again. I only want to have a quiet life. Have you ever lived in a house and eaten chicken and game casserole? That’s what I want. A quiet life.’

  The fox looked at him. ‘Mm,’ it said. ‘Can you walk now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I’ll take you to someone who can help you with your life,’ offered the fox. ‘He doesn’t live too far from here. Follow me.’ And it set off at a fast clip.

  Tag was delighted, but he soon found it hard to keep up. ‘Don’t hang about,’ advised the fox, as it leapt one fence, then squeezed itself between two loose boards of another. ‘Come on, come on.’

  It circled a kidney-shaped pond, pushed through some bushes into a passageway down the side of a house. Under a gate they went. There was a reek of something chemical and burnt. There were lights high up over a great expanse of tarmac. ‘Wait here,’ ordered the fox. Tag blinked in the buzzing orange light. Something huge and reeking roared past, twenty inches from his nose! He winced away. ‘Don’t bother about that,’ ordered the fox. ‘It’s just a car. They can’t kill you if you’re quick. Come on, come on!’ And then it was
gardens again, at a cracking pace.

  Eventually they came to an arbor or summerhouse built of old gray wooden trellis, twined inside and out with fifty or sixty summers and winters of clematis and climbing rose. Tag stood with the fox at the entrance. Inside was a rough wooden bench. The back wall seemed too solid to be made of trellis. It had a strange shine. It seemed to be full of moonlight.

  ‘Does he live here?’

  ‘Among other places.’

  ‘What must I do?’

  ‘Just go in,’ advised the fox.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just go in and see what happens.’

  Tag approached the threshold.

  Another cat had come into the summerhouse while he was talking to the fox. It was staring suspiciously out at him from the gloom. Another cat! Before he could stop himself, he had run away across the lawn. Half turning back, hindquarters low to the ground, he sniffed the air. Another cat – and one a lot more powerful, dirty, and tattered than he was. A cat of his own age, but with much more experience. A real outdoor cat with lean muscles and a desperate look about him. Just the sort of cat Tag avoided when he could. Just the sort of cat whose help he needed. He sniffed again. He couldn’t smell anything.

  He crept back to the fox’s side.

  ‘I dare not speak to the wild cat,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid to look at him.’

  The fox chuckled. ‘Go in. You can touch him.’

  ‘No.’

  The fox loomed up.

  ‘Touch him,’ it said menacingly.

  Tag shrank away from the fox. He crept up to the threshold of the summerhouse. Inside, he approached the other cat. It approached him. He kept low; it kept low. When he flattened his ears, it flattened its ears. When he stretched out a paw and tapped, a paw was outstretched to tap his paw. Glass! It was glass! With a flood of relief and disappointment he understood who he was looking at.

  ‘But that’s only me,’ said Tag.

  The fox laughed wryly. ‘You had it right the first time,’ it said. It came and sat beside Tag so that its own reflection appeared in the glass next to his. ‘There’s a real tearaway in there,’ it said, studying Tag’s image with some interest. ‘A genuine desperado. Still, I rest my case. Only me, eh? Is that how you see yourself? Only you is worth a good deal more than you think.’